In the field of telecommunications services, the term “commercial product” and the attributes making up said commercial product are used to refer to the conditions with which a telecommunication service is offered to the users, in which conditions different variables used by telecommunications operators to market the telecommunication services that they offer on their networks (marketing mix) will be involved. Thus, for marketing a voice service on Internet protocol (IP), the operator can define a commercial product with various attributes: price of the monthly subscription fee, rate per minute of conversation, quality of the voice service on IP, offer of no fee for the first 3 months, etc. All these attributes make up the offered commercial product and, as observed, they can be prices, incentives or promotions, discounts, qualitative attributes of the service, etc. The choice of the value for all these attributes will determine the success of the commercial product offered by the operator for achieving his objectives.
One of the mechanisms most used by telecommunications operators for achieving the objectives of revenue generated by the telecommunication services and stimulating the demand for certain telecommunication services is the definition of promotions (a type of commercial product) which serve as an incentive for the users for their use or consumption. These promotions are commonly based on better conditions (price reductions, improvement of parameters of the service at the same price, etc.) of using or enjoying the service. Thus, for example, incentives performing a discount percentage on a base rate, incentives offering the purchase of the units of a service in batches or vouchers involving a lower price per unit, preferential conditions of quality of a service at the same price or gift or discounts in the consumption of other services due to having performed a certain consumption of the service the demand for which is to be encouraged can be found.
The main concept underlying these promotions is the elasticity of the demand: in certain services or goods there is the possibility of generating greater revenue upon offering better conditions of acquiring the good or service, since the increase of demand induced with the promotional offer is greater in percentage than the decrease of the margin obtained with the sale of the good or service due to the better conditions. The most basic example is the “elasticity of the demand” with respect to the price: a service is “elastic” with respect to the price when a decrease of the price of the service causes a greater increase in percentage of the demand and, therefore, of the revenue. Suppose that sending an SMS (short message of a Short Message Service, offered in mobile cellular networks and in fixed telephony networks) in the network of an operator has a cost for the user of 20 monetary units and that the usual demand for this service on Saturday is on average 3 SMSs per user of the network. With this scenario, the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) on Saturday would be 60 monetary units. If an incentive involving a reduction of 25% of the unitary price of the short message, becoming 15 monetary units, is offered to the users, and the users increases their demand, resulting in a consumption of 5 short messages per user, the average revenue per user will now be 75 monetary units. This example demonstrates the elasticity which the demand for the short message service would have in this case, since a reduction of the price has allowed increasing the revenue obtained for this service.
Another very important concept for the effectiveness of the attributes chosen for a commercial product and widely used today is the segmentation of the users of the operator, defining user groups or segments to which the commercial most suitable products can be addressed to meet their consumption and achieve the commercial or economic objectives of the operator, using the elasticity. Until recently, telecommunication services were limited in number to a small set, but the inclusion of multimedia capacities in telecommunications networks is allowing the development of many varied telecommunications services. Due to this large range of services which is presented, telecommunications operators are detailing the concept of segmentation tending towards “microsegmentation” which allows defining small user groups to which adapted and customized services as well as conditions of payment and consumption suited to their preferences, can be offered, always with a view to guiding the behavior of use of such services such that the operator obtains greater revenue, profits or any other objective function considered. The determination of segments or groups can be performed according to many variables, but those related to the consumption by the users are fundamentally used. It is also usual to define user groups with aspects in common to which beneficial promotional conditions can be addressed, such as for example those formed by the Friends&Family of the user, or larger-sized groups formed by users with affinities (called “tribes” in certain sectors), the members of which are offered individual commercial products exclusively related to belonging to the group.
Current methods used to define the attributes of the commercial products for a service (either to establish the price of a service, a promotion, the association in a pack with other services) are fundamentally based on performing surveys on the users, the application of promotions which worked well in other services or the performance of pilot tests with very reduced user groups, which guide in the choice of the most suitable values for the attributes of the commercial product for that service. After that the specific commercial product (for example, a discount promotion) which is believed to be the most suitable for the user group for which it is intended, which in many cases will have a large number of users, is offered. Finally, after a time period in which the offer of the commercial product (for example, the period in which the promotion is active) has been valid, the historic data of purchase of the product and the consumptions of the corresponding service by the users are analyzed to evaluate the impact of the commercial product and take it into account for future definitions and launches of other commercial products (for example, future promotions).
The technical processes currently used to perform that analysis are based on consulting and analyzing information records included in large databases of the operators, called data warehouse. These databases contain millions of records with information provided by various elements of the telecommunications network of the operator and relative to the individual use of the service by each user. These databases are also commonly used to perform the segmentations of users into groups or segments, according to the aspects chosen by the operator, normally related to their individual patterns of consumption of the telecommunication services for the ones which are to be segmented: for example, a segmentation can be performed according to the number of minutes of conversation in telephone calls consumed by the users on average per day, designating a larger or smaller number of segments according to the established number of minute consumption levels. The analysis processes on these databases (known as data mining), both for determining the segmentation and for analyzing the consumptions with an offered commercial product, are usually costly in processing time due to the large number of records existing in said databases, corresponding to all the interactions of the users with the telecommunication network of the operator. This is added to the fact that increasingly more processing operations for different user groups and for multiple services are necessary.
This problem is emphasized if it is contemplated that in telecommunications services the patterns of consumption change over time due to seasonal mechanisms, isolated events or a combination of multiple external circumstances that are difficult to predict and quantify, i.e., there is a dynamic behavior over time in the demand of the users, which is variable also according to the user group considered. This involves that the demand for a commercial product (for example, for a promotion) does not have to be the same at different instants of time, whereby it is necessary to repeat the data analysis of the data warehouse which has been mentioned every certain time period. Suppose that a commercial product with promotion format, such as the discount in sending short messages mentioned above, starts to be offered in June, but only during a time slot of the day, for example, from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Upon performing an analysis of the consumption of the service during the first week by means of an analysis of the records of the data warehouse it is observed that it has entailed an increase of revenue for the operator. However, with the summer and holiday period which starts to be observed in July, the patterns of consumption vary and the incentive is no longer effective it is maintained in the mentioned time slot. If one refrains from processing records of the data warehouse with sufficient frequency, a delay is introduced in the detection of the ineffectiveness of the attributes of the commercial product and in the possibility of introducing corrective actions. On the contrary, raising the frequency with which records of consumption of the data warehouse are analyzed involves an extremely significant increase of number of calculations and operations, which involves a highly considerable burden on the equipment. This entire manner of proceeding causes unquestionable technical problems in relation to the capacity of a quick and dynamic analysis which allows knowing with very little delay the effectiveness that the attributes of a commercial product have for optimizing the demand of different user groups to achieve the objectives established by the operator, as well as in the capacity for dynamically modifying the attributes of said commercial product to adapt to the time variations of demand of the users, seeking to have at all time the optimal attributes of that commercial product.
On the other hand, the networks of telecommunications operators have a charging system which allows charging the users for the use, consumption or enjoyment of the services offered on said networks. The trend in the field of charging systems is to change to real-time charging systems (or OCS, Online Charging Systems) or hotbilling systems, in which with nil or very little delay the user is suitably charged for the use of a service according to his interaction with the network. In those systems, only the events of interest generated by the network are collected and they are analyzed at the same time, never accumulating data to subsequently process them as occurs in the case of the data warehouse. These charging systems furthermore have the configuration of prices, rates, consumption limits, etc., which are used to charge for the use of the different commercial products, such as the examples of promotions indicated above.
It is also known that in the field of commerce over the Internet (e-commerce), many vendors offer goods or services which “perish” or expire on a certain date (for example, airplane tickets or hotel accommodation) the price of which is dynamically modified over time as the purchase or consumption deadline date draws near and according to the inventory level that they still have of the good, for the purposes of optimizing their revenue or profits, taking into account that the unsold units on the deadline date will not generate any revenue. This price dynamization has been possible in online commerce as a result of the capacities offered by the Internet to be able to change and announce the new rates with hardly any cost.
However, outside the field of internet, in the world of telecommunication services it is very complex to use dynamization techniques due to the current features of the systems making up the telecommunication networks. Thus, for example, although the communication to the users of a change in the conditions of offering a service offered in a telecommunications network is not expensive as it is possible to use the actual communication mechanisms with which the network of the operator is provided, most of the systems related to charging need manual interventions to make rate changes in the telecommunication services.
Therefore, the need has been detected to find methods and systems to be implemented in current telecommunication networks which allow analyzing in real time the effectiveness of the multiple attributes of the commercial products associated with telecommunication services offered on a telecommunications network without excess calculations having to be generated, and at the same automatically act accordingly on those attributes, refining them with automatic dynamization methods, which optimize the consumption and the use of said product for the objective desired by the supplier of the commercial product or the operator of the telecommunications network. Furthermore, it is necessary to inform the users of the different groups or segments of which are the new attributes of the commercial product, resulting from the refining with the automatic methods.
United States patent application 2001/0051932 “Method and System For Dynamic Pricing” describes a method and system for conducting real-time experiments which allow determining the optimal values of marketing variables such as the price in the Internet business environment (e-commerce). The system allows performing that experimentation for differentiated client segments of the Internet business and obtaining the optimal values for each segment. However, the method used is focused on commerce over the Internet but does not describe a method which allows applying the experimentation and the dynamization in the environment of a classic telecommunications network and its associated services (for example, a GSM cellular network). As has been previously described, the services offered by a telecommunications operator imposes restrictions in the dynamization such as the integration with the billing systems of the operator (the complexity of the charging is considerably greater than in e-commerce websites), the need for a very quick convergence towards the optimal values with parallel experimentation in various user groups or effective methods for collecting the large amount of information relative to the consumption of the users generated by the network of the operator.
United States patent application US 2004/0009762 “Dynamic Pricing and Yield Management in Mobile Communications” describes a system for encouraging the consumption in a communications network, especially in low-traffic periods, by means of variations of the price of the services, thus allowing the operator to increase his revenue and use the capacity of the network which is not used, whereby a maximum return is achieved on the investment. The method and system are fundamentally focused on the segmentation of the users according to criteria and data extracted from the databases of the operator and from the CDRs generated by the network elements. The identified segments are offered incentives for consumption chosen by the operator of the system and the suitable measurements are taken to determine the elasticity observed in the demand with the incentive. The system is aimed at processing CDRs and at the post-process charging within the network.
The complexity of the commercial products which are launched in current telecommunication networks, with multiple attributes of a different field, makes a quick convergence towards the attributes which together form the optimal commercial product even more necessary, especially in services with demands which vary quickly. It is also important for the telecommunications operator to assure an integration as efficient as possible with the systems of the network of said telecommunications operator, which prevents an excessive use of the resources of the network and of the processing capacity of the equipment.